


you are a defiant act of creation

by deathsweetqueen



Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werecreatures, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Hybrid Tony Stark, Hybrids, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Indian Tony Stark, Misogyny, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Violence, Werewolf Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:15:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24470428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathsweetqueen/pseuds/deathsweetqueen
Summary: The boy looks up at her. He’s thin and short, sickly made, like a good breeze could knock him to his death, but he looks up at her like he’s willing to fight, willing to fight until the end.“You’re a werewolf,” Toni says, sceptically.The boy scowls up at her. He looks no older than twelve. If the boy had lived in her time, he would have died in the winter with all the weak animals, and they would not have mourned him at all.“Yeah, I am. What’s it to you?” the boy asks, defiantly.Toni tilts her head. It’s been a long time since anyone had the temerity to talk to her with such a tone, and she leans back on her heels, crouching low. She grips him by the jaw, and he tries to get out of his grasp, but a thousand-year-old hybrid is stronger than a barely pubescent werewolf, and he can only struggle so much.“I want to make you strong,” she says, her smile a soft, intimate thing.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600798
Comments: 36
Kudos: 187
Collections: Tony Stark Bingo 2020





	you are a defiant act of creation

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the "Vampire/Werewolf" square (K2) for the Tony Stark Bingo 2020.
> 
> The title for this fic comes from Elisabeth Hewer's poem, Wishing for Birds.
> 
> I had a lot of thoughts with this, mainly Klaroline ones, and then, I started wondering whether TVD/TO was intimating that the werewolves in Mystic Falls were supposed to be Native Americans, and that in this fic, I was saying that Howard was Native American, but I didn't feel right tagging that when I didn't acknowledge it properly. So, maybe, I'll write a bigger story around this fic, with Toni and how she became a hybrid and what those thousand years were like and her killing Obadiah and the life she has after.

The boy looks up at her. He’s thin and short, sickly made, like a good breeze could knock him to his death, but he looks up at her like he’s willing to fight, willing to fight until the end.

“You’re a werewolf,” Toni says, sceptically.

The boy scowls up at her. He looks no older than twelve. If the boy had lived in her time, he would have died in the winter with all the weak animals, and they would not have mourned him at all.

“Yeah, I am. What’s it to you?” the boy asks, defiantly.

Toni tilts her head. It’s been a long time since anyone had the temerity to talk to her with such a tone, and she leans back on her heels, crouching low. She grips him by the jaw, and he tries to get out of his grasp, but a thousand-year-old hybrid is stronger than a barely pubescent werewolf, and he can only struggle so much.

“I want to make you strong,” she says, her smile a soft, intimate thing.

The boy stops struggling. “What are you talkin’ about?”

Toni’s smile stretches wide across her teeth, her fangs growing out of her mouth, and she can taste his fear in the air. His struggles renew.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she says, amazed.

“You’re a fuckin’ vampire,” he snaps.

“No, I’m not,” Toni tells him.

The boy stares at her, his brow furrowed. “I just saw your teeth. Of _course_ you’re a fuckin’ vampire-”

“My name,” she begins, cutting across him decisively like the glint of a raised knife, “is Antonia Stark. Do you know who I am now?”

There’s a beat, and the boy starts struggling again, scrabbling to get away.

“Calm down,” she says, sternly. “I want to help you.”

“ _Help_ me?” the boy demands. “I know who you are, okay? You’re that hybrid dame, right? One of the original vampires?”

Humour dances in her eyes. “Guilty as charged,” she says, smoothly.

“You’ve been huntin’ werewolves,” the boy accuses.

Toni chuckles and takes a seat in the dirt, folding her legs underneath her. “I have, but not for the reasons that you think. I don’t have this… _thing_ for dead werewolves. I’m trying to help them.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” the boy says, derisively.

“Think about it,” she tells him, almost plaintively. “You are a slave to the full moon, slave to the wolf inside you. I am _not_. I am in control of myself constantly. I can shift as I please. The moon bows to _me_ , not the other way. I can make you strong like I am.”

The boy stares at her, his throat flexing. “I wouldn’t have to shift?” he says, in a small voice, in a child’s voice. “Ever again?”

Toni shudders, remembering the first time, when she’d closed her mouth around the pulse point of a villager and filled her belly with blood until the body between her hands turned limp with death, and the flood of agony as her bones broke, one by one.

“No, you wouldn’t. It would be your choice,” she replies, softly.

“Why?” the boy demands. “Why would you wanna help me? You don’t owe me anythin’.”

Toni laughs. “I never said that I’d do it for free,” she points out.

The boy’s face turns immediately suspicious, and even resigned at the edges. “What do you want?” he asks, wearily.

“I want your allegiance,” she says, simply. “I want your word that you’ll come when I call, that you’ll fight when I fight.”

“You sound like you’re some medieval warlord-war _lady_ ,” he says, his brow furrowing.

Toni smiles an enigmatic smile. “Well, I have played that role over the centuries.”

“I’m not dumb, ya know?” the boy says, scowling absolute murder. “I’m not just gonna let you do some crazy ritual on me to stop me from shiftin’ without knowin’ what I have t’give ya in return.”

“You’re smart,” she croons. “I like that. I like smart boys.”

The boy snorts. “I’m not a boy, ya know? I’m nineteen.”

Toni stares at him. “You look like you’re twelve,” she says, flatly.

“You’re kind of a bitch, you know?” the boy retorts.

Toni smiles and lets her eyes bleed gold, lets the veins under her eyes rise to the surface. “You know, strangely enough, you might be the first person that’s called me that in my incredibly long life and lived to tell the tale of it,” she murmurs. “Mostly because you werewolves are a dying breed and I can’t just keep _eating_ you when you piss me off.”

The boy either completely understands what danger he’s in and doesn’t seem to care, or he doesn’t seem to realise who he’s talking to and what sort of terrible fate he’s inviting on himself by insulting her.

She takes a seat on the cold, hard dirt, folding her legs underneath her, and his eyes widen, not because she’s suddenly very close to him, but because her clearly expensive clothes are about to become filthy, but she doesn’t seem to care.

“I have an enemy,” she begins in a halting voice, honest and simple perhaps for the first time since she woke up in a hut in a village that no longer exists and craved the taste of blood. “There is a man who wants to hurt me; he has hurt me before. He wants me dead. I have been running from him for the last thousand years, and there is coming a time when I can’t run from him anymore.”

“And what, you want an army to fight this guy?” the boy asks, sceptically.

Toni shrugs. “Yes,” she says, bluntly.

“Why does he want to kill you?”

For some reason, he doesn’t ask the question that Toni is expecting: _why should I care whether some guy wants to kill you?_

“He was my father once,” she says, honestly.

The boy’s face flickers with surprise. “I thought-”

“I am one of the first,” Toni says, honestly. “Contrary to popular belief, I did not consort with demons because I was tired of being powerless; although I did chafe under the yoke of man, I will admit. I did not summon some evil entity to turn me into this. I did not have my heart broken by some stupid boy, and I did not seek revenge against him by turning myself into a monster so I could kill him. I _was_ killed and I suppose, to some eyes, at least the eyes of those of my time, I came back _wrong_.”

In the stories, she is either a victim or an aggressor, both of which is true, she supposes, and there was never a boy, not really; she is not some spurned lover, and she despises the idea that a boy is needed to make her empathetic character, as if that is the only way that she can be one, after she has been used and abused and thrown out like trash by someone with a cock, as if that is the only thing needed to make her worthy of compassion.

And now, she roams the world, feeding where she pleases, fucking as much as it takes to satiate her, and quietly, methodically, sits atop an empire of vampires and werewolves and witches that she and her sister built together, with dogs baying at their heels and blood flowing through the streets endlessly.

“So, what _did_ happen?” the boy asks, almost like he thinks he’s entitled to the story, _her_ story _._

Toni shrugs. “My mother and the man whom I thought was my father, they came from what is Norway today after a terrible plague that claimed the life of the child my mother was carrying in her womb. My mother was a witch, and she was told of this mystical land far away in the New World where the inhabitants experienced good health, speed and strength. She did not realise at the time that the reason why those inhabitants experienced good health, speed and strength was because they were not humans themselves. They were werewolves.”

The boy’s face flickers with surprise.

“Yes, there were werewolves even back then,” Toni says, dryly. “My parents settled in this mystical land, Timely-”

“I was born there,” the boy exclaims.

Toni’s gut drops for a moment (she has long since refused to believe in coincidences). “Of course you were,” she murmurs.

He has a Brooklyn accent, but perhaps they moved when he was young, young enough to shed the veneer that Timely leaves on all of its sons and daughters.

“You’re saying… that all of this started in Timely?” the boy says, slowly. “The vampires and the-”

“-the werewolves too,” Toni tells him. “The pack that lived in Timely were descended from the first themselves.” She gnaws on her lower lip. “My parents were heavily unprepared to live amongst the wolves, though. My mother’s… powers were the only thing that kept them and the rest of the villagers that came over to the New World with them safe on the full moon.”

The boy’s face pales in a rush, almost sickly looking, as if realising the threat that the werewolves would have posed to the villagers.

Strange, considering that one must have killed someone to trigger the werewolf curse in the first place.

She’s never met a werewolf who dislikes brutal murder as much as this one does.

“I was their first living child,” Toni muses aloud, “and then after me, came my sister, Virginia. That was all they could have. My father and I did not get along. He beat me often. I was a wilful girl.”

The look she gives him is heavy and deliberate.

“They did not like wilful girls much back then. My father demanded obedience from my sister and I, and I was not the obedient sort.”

She doesn’t tell him of the time when she dared to take his blade and he chained her up like a dog by the throat and refused to feed her for days. She doesn’t tell him of the scars on her back, scars that never faded long after she became a vampire and a hybrid after that, for having the temerity to drag one of the village boys into the woods and lift her skirts for him. She doesn’t tell her of how her mother once hit her so hard that she tasted blood in her mouth for refusing how to make leg of lamb.

“One day, one of the wolves thought to steal my sister, Virginia, take her for their own, I imagine to breed with her or take her as a concubine, and I killed him. I could not stop myself, and I inherited my mother’s powers, even if I had no particular instruction in them. My relationship with my father was… fraught with tension enough that it would not have ended well for him had I been as powerful as my mother, so he made her promise that she would never teach us, my sister or I, and she… she loved him, as foolish as that was; by the time that my sister and I came along, she was already so within his hold that nothing, not even her own children, could have taken her from him. I digress though.”

She waves her hand in the air to illustrate her point, and she has his attention, and he can’t even take his eyes off her now, too fascinated by the glimpse of the woman behind the beast, the woman that no one has seen in centuries. 

“It started a war between the villagers and the werewolves, that night, when they tried to take my sister and I killed one of their pack. My mother, fearing that we would die, she did something, something terrible, I would imagine, to someone else; although, she did it to save our lives, to protect us. We were eating dinner one night, and suddenly, I saw my father charging at me. I threw myself in front of Virginia – Pepper, I call her, my sister – but he didn’t hesitate to run me through with his sword.”

The boy’s face contorts with disgust, and he opens his mouth.

“I’m-I’m _sorry_ ,” he says, floundering through his words.

Toni tilts her head. “Why?” she asks, bluntly.

The boy frowns. “Why what?”

“Why be sorry? It’s not as if you know me, know my sister, know my father. I am not telling you my story so that you’ll pity me, kid.”

The boy straightens, squares his shoulder, as he looks at Toni with determination. “So, what happened after your father stabbed you?”

Toni shrugs. “Everything went black. Honestly, the pain came just as I was falling unconscious. I don’t really remember much of it. When I woke up, my throat was on fire, and my father was there, and he was shoving a bleeding human in front of me, one of the village girls, and I was drinking, and after me, Pepper was drinking, and it was different. I felt _different_ , stronger, more… fuller and brighter, more alive, even if I’d just been killed,” she muses.

Then, she shakes her head.

“But the hunger was the worst. My father kept us trapped in our home the first few days, my sister and I, and then, one day, we escaped, we made it to the rest of the village, and it was too much for us, the call of the blood. My sister gave into her thirst first, fed off some old man that was stumbling drunkenly back to his hut. She killed him, not because she drained him of his blood, but because she didn’t know her own strength. She snapped all of his bones like they were toothpicks between her arms. And then, I saw this girl. She was most likely my age, I think. I don’t remember her anymore, not even her face. She passed by me, and the breeze made her hair flutter, and I couldn’t help myself. I tore open her throat like I was a rabid animal, and she died in my arms. And that’s when-”

“-you triggered your curse,” the boy says, quietly, having guessed the end.

Toni inclines her head at him. “The worst pain that I’ve ever felt, even worse than being stabbed in the heart by my father’s sword. And Pepper came to me, and she was crying, but I threw her away from me, and then, I was the wolf, and the wolf was me, and somehow, I managed to keep away from the village. I made it through the forest to the wolves’ settlement, and things did not end well, I have to admit. I woke up in the forest, naked, covered in blood, surrounded by dead wolves, after four days, but more _whole_ that I’d ever been,” she finishes, fiercely. “Pepper found me in the forest; she gave me clothes, and I realised something.”

“What?”

“Pepper killed someone before me, you know?” Toni says pointedly, remembering with gut-wrenching technicolour the sight of her sister, her only sister, blood staining her dress and her eyes red with tears as she sobs in Toni’s arms over the loss of a life that Toni would have ended a thousand times over if it means keeping her sister safe and alive. “She killed that old man first, and nothing happened to her. But when I did, when I killed that girl, something changed within me, something was awakened within me, and it was because the man whom I thought was my father all those years was _not_ my father.”

“Because you inherit the gene,” the boy says, finally, heavily, like he knows the burden that she’s talking about.

She’s furious and relieved in equal measure: furious that he would ever think to compare a thousand years of tragedy against whatever pitiful, short-lived troubles that he has had, and relieved that she doesn’t have to speak further, that whatever the boy’s perspective is, however imperfect it may be, it is enough for him to understand, to feel something when she tells her story.

“Yes,” Toni says, a sour taste laden in her voice. “You inherit the werewolf gene, and so, considering my father, the ardent Viking that he was, had gone to battle many times and killed many a foe and yet had never turned into a beast the likes that I was, considering that my sister too was not cursed with the same affliction, I figured out this great secret that my mother had kept from me, that I was not my father’s daughter, that I was her bastard. When I confronted her with it, she confessed to me that the reason why she lost her first child was because he had beaten her so badly and killed the baby within her. So, she wanted revenge, and what better revenge than to lie with the beasts that her husband hated and beget a child from one of them?” she finishes acidly.

She leans back, and the sun that cuts in sharp through the canopy of trees above them drenches her in warmth and light, as if she is the sort of being that lingers in those sorts of things, instead of the shadows and death.

When she clasps eyes on her companion, his eyes follow every curve and line of her body.

He’s nineteen, after all; how can he help himself?

She had thought him to be barely a teenager, but at second glance, she sees his eyes, blue like a summer storm, and the hard-cut look to his gaze, and the firm, fierce line of his mouth, and she knows, in her bones, that he is as old as he says he is, perhaps even older in soul than he is in face.

There is enough emotion roiling within her, after having opened her mouth to tell her story for the first time in hundreds upon hundreds of years, that she wouldn’t mind a good fuck on the forest floor, if it means getting back to the beginning and the pith of herself.

“All those years, she pretended that I was her husband’s child, and he never knew, never knew that I was not his, not until I took my first life, and I took on my real father’s countenance for the first time. And then, he was wroth, terrible in his rage, and my mother, despite her powers, despite her once-hunger for vengeance, was powerless in the face of it. My father snapped my sister’s neck, when she came to my aid, and I screamed, and then, there was pain, pain like I’d never felt before, even worse than that first shift, and when I woke up, I could no longer feel the wolf inside me. I was _chained_ ,” she says, her expression turning into an angry, fearsome thing. “I don’t like that. I don’t like to be chained, and I killed her, I killed my mother; Pepper held her down, while I ripped her heart out of her chest. She never loved me, never loved either of us, not really; we were her weapons, weapons so that she could find some endless war against her husband. And her husband escaped, fled through the woods, and came across the werewolf settlement, whatever was left of them after I’d been through there.”

“What did he do?” The boy is unable to help his curiosity.

“He fought my father, my true father, the alpha of the pack, and killed him. Later, Pepper and I found his body; he was still alive. He breathed his last, when I touched his cheek,” she murmurs and wrings her hands together, remembering the sodden feeling in her throat when her father’s eyes had closed, and his body went limp against that post. She shakes her head. “My mother’s husband has hunted me these thousand years, and now, I am finally strong enough to kill him.”

The words grind out of her like steel on stone, and she knows it to be true, her voice rich with promise.

“If you’re strong enough to kill him, why do you need an army?”

He studies her with pale, clever eyes.

“Because he doesn’t have one,” Toni says, simply. “And I’m not stupid enough to walk into a war with no allies.”

“Allies or servants?” the boy pushes.

Toni smiles. “I am good to those who treat me well.” She pauses. “I realised that I did not get your name.”

The boy flushes, the colour high in his cheeks. “Steve. Steve Rogers.”

“Steve,” Toni says, sounding out the syllable slowly. She stretches out her hand for him to take. “It’s very nice to meet you, Steve.”

Steve takes her hand and shakes it cautiously. “I’d say the same, but you want to kill me, so…” he trails off.

Toni laughs, bold and bright, the sound rattling the trees above her. “I don’t want to kill you, Steve,” she says, smoothly. “I want to give you a new life, one free of pain and stress. You’ll never have to worry about the moon again; you’ll never have to worry that you might claw your loved one’s face off when you’re in half-shift. You could go home. I doubt you imagined you’d be spending the rest of your life making a shelter out of dirt.”

Steve just scowls at her.

“Tell me,” she cajoles.

“Tell you what?”

“How it happened, what you did to trigger your course. I told you my story, after all.”

“I didn’t force you to,” Steve points out.

“Are you going to leave me hanging, Steve Rogers?” Toni demands.

“Wow, you really are pushy, aren’t you?” Steve mutters under his breath.

Funny how she doesn’t want to pull his lungs out by his throat; she would’ve had it been anyone else who spoke so cavalierly towards her.

Nowadays, only Pepper and Rhodey had the credibility to speak to her like that without inviting her violence.

“I inherited the gene through my mother,” Steve says, simply, shrugging his bony shoulders. “I was… I was always an angry guy. I’m small, and people used to make fun of me. I didn’t have many friends growin’ up. We were poor; my mother was a nurse; she used to work all the shifts she could get just to put food on the table.”

He sounds almost defiant as he says it, as if he’s half-expecting her to show him disdain for his unfortunate circumstances.

Toni’s lips twitch. Strange how people think she grew up wealthy when she would have to go down to the well every morning just so they would have water to drink, and when winter came, it bit her so strongly, seeped straight into her bones, that she thought she would die then and there.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends,” he tells her. “No one wanted to be friends with the guy you could step on, you know?”

Toni never had many friends either; she only ever had Pepper, and now, Rhodey.

“Except for one guy,” Steve says and looks away (she can see the shine of tears in his pale eyes). He clears his throat, shifting uncomfortable. “His name was Bucky. He was my best friend. He pulled me out of all sorts of scrapes. He taught me how to throw a punch without breakin’ my fingers. He used to sneak my ma and I food when we had nothin’.”

“Did you kill him?” she asks, bluntly.

Steve’s eyes fling to hers, horrified. “What? No! Why would you even say that?”

Toni shrugs. “The way that you were going with it, either you killed him and that’s how you triggered your curse, or he was involved somehow when the curse was triggered. Did I misunderstand?”

Toni doesn’t need an answer in reply; she can see it in the tension clear in the tilt of his shoulder blades. 

“We were walkin’ home one night,” he begins, in a soft, strange lilt. “There were these guys on the side of the road. They were pushin’ this girl into the alley, and she was strugglin’. She didn’t want to be there. When we ran over, they had her pinned up against the wall, pawin’ at her clothes, and she was cryin’. We tried to stop them, but there was too many of ‘em for the two of us.”

“They killed him?” Toni guesses, with bruised kindness, the tone awkward on the edge of her tongue – she’s not good with kindness, with warmth, the soft parts of a woman that people expect from her.

All she is, is fire and rage and violence.

Steve nods, his expression turning strained, his shoulders hunched, as if the weight of the grief will soon cripple him.

“I just… I was so angry. I saw Bucky on the ground, and he was bleedin’ so much, and I… I’ve never been angry like that, not like… not like I could kill someone, you know?”

She did know.

“And then, before I even knew what I was doin, I was grabbin’ some broken beer bottle off the ground and I was shivvin’ one of the guys in the throat.” He shakes his head. “There was blood everywhere.”

He breathes deep, a man in pain.

“I just remember… there was a lot of pain, and when I looked up, all of them were scared of me, _me_! Little Stevie Rogers, and they were all runnin’ away,” he says, derisively. “Even the girl that we saved. She ran out of there like a bat out of hell. I went home,” he says, after a moment, his voice small like a child’s. “I wanted my ma, but she was already dead by then. I was alone. When the full moon came around a couple of weeks later, I shifted. It hurt so much, but I managed to keep inside the storage unit of the apartment building we were livin’ in. Didn’t hurt anyone, didn’t kill any more people. The superintendent thought there was some cult down there, or some crazy sex ritual goin’ on, what with all the chains and shit I found to keep me down there.”

“And after?” she prods, softly.

“I left,” he says, bluntly. “I left Brooklyn, my apartment, all of it, and I came here. Figured it was remote enough that I couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

“But sometimes there are hikers.”

Steve scowls, looking all at once violent and miserable. “I go real deep into the woods, past all the hiking trails. They don’t get that far. I don’t hurt people.” He looks away. “That’s what you want me to do, right? Hurt people?”

“Not necessarily,” she muses.

Steve looks at her, half sceptical, half confused. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“I want you to help me kill Obadiah, my stepfather,” she says, honestly. “I don’t expect you to kill him for me. No, I am the one that’s going to deliver the killing blow. It’s what I’ve wanted for over a thousand years, and I don’t think I will ever sleep for more than an hour a night if he’s not dead. I expect you to help me kill the vampires that I am sure he will draw to his cause. But I don’t need you to kill anyone else.”

Steve snorts. “You don’t want me as your bodyguard for the rest of eternity.”

Toni laughs, throwing her head back to expose the long, lean line of her neck. “You know, I’ve been alive for a very long time, and I outgrew the need of a bodyguard a very long time ago,” she drawls, waggling her eyebrows.

He turns red, all the way into his ears.

It’s endearing, how easy he blushes in her presence, like he doesn’t know if he’s going or coming when he’s with her.

She’s hoping for the latter at least once.

“You can do whatever you like, Steve, when Obadiah is dead, when my sister and I are safe. I don’t care what you do. I don’t expect you to kill anyone else for me. I’m capable of doing my own killing, despite what people think. I just need you for this one task.”

“What do I get out of this?” Steve asks, pointedly.

“Other than knowing that you’ll never have to shift again, not unless you want to?” Toni lifts an eyebrow. “You could shift any part of yourself; you would have total control over your body. You could live forever; you would be stronger than any vampire, any werewolf, except for my sister and I and Obadiah, faster, more agile, better senses, more durable; you would heal faster from any wounds. You wouldn’t need a daylight ring as other vampires do. You could compel humans. Your bite would be deadly to vampires.”

Steve purses his lips. “I’d never have to shift again? I’d never have to hurt anyone and not be able to do anythin’ about it?”

Toni nods, oddly charmed that’s his only question.

“And I…” He hesitates for an agonising moment, a sheen of nostalgia covering his eyes. “I’d never be weak again.”

His face hardens, and she guesses he’s remembering that night, the night where his friend dies and his entire world falls apart and how it felt like to get beaten into the dirt over and over again and not be able to do anything when the one you love most is bleeding out beside you.

Toni knows what that feels like; she knows it in her bones and in her belly what it means to be weak in the face of someone stronger, someone who hates you for no reason, who just wants to see you bleeding and mute and cowering before them, so that you know your rightful place, ground under their heel.

And despite what people think, Toni knows what it is to love and to be afraid for the people that you love.

She loves her sister; she loves Rhodey. She will always do right by them. She will always protect them, and the only way to protect them is to kill Obadiah, and to kill Obadiah, she needs hybrids.

She needs people who don’t want the cotton candy ideals of being a vampire or a hybrid; she needs people who have broken and come out stronger after climbing out of the fire, because that is who she is; she needs people who are solid, unyielding and unrepentant, but manage to remain kind, despite everything that has happened to them to turn them into broken, mean, measly creatures, because she is not kind – she is cruel and full of violence, and there must be something to temper her rage.

And God help her, she needs Steve Rogers.

“You will never be weak again,” she promises, because she will not allow it, she will not allow anyone who stands with her to be weak again, just as she would never allow for herself to be weak again.

The village girl that dreamed of fat babies and maybe a swath of silk from the market if the harvest had been good the spring before had died when she’d been strung up to a wooden post by her own mother and father and carved into pieces, pieces which were taken away from her at another’s pleasure, like she were nothing more than meat, and she had no will or mind of her own.

“So, what do you say? Will you fight with me, Steve Rogers?” Toni asks, sliding to her face with all the grace of a loping wolf.

She gazes down at him, expectantly, the smile on her face taking on the bright edge of the wolf that she’d been denied until almost recently.

Steve blinks up at her and then, he clambers upright; he’s the same height as her, which doesn’t say as much considering she’d always been quite short, and then, he takes her hand.

He looks at her, purposefully, and she runs the tip of a nail along her wrist, slicing into the skin deep enough that it makes the blood rise to the surface. She stretches it out to him, and he takes it between his slim hand, dipping his head, his spun-gold hair covering his face, and she feels the pull of his mouth against the wound as he drinks.

When he’s done, he pulls away, and his eyes are dark; werewolves have no use for the blood (they prefer the meat), but there is something about the life they can taste in the blood that they don’t mind, and his mouth is stained a dark red.

When she looks down, he’s hard in his jeans, and she feels the answering kick in her belly, spreading between her legs until she’s slick with want.

She lunges forward and presses her mouth to his with bruising force.

He groans, but he doesn’t push her away, like she’s half-expecting him to.

She can taste the blood, her blood, and it makes her leak even more between her legs, and she shoves him down, down onto the ground, on top of the leaves and perches on his lap.

They’re about the same size, but Toni’s body curves around her hips, and she’s fuller around her breasts. She takes her clothes off first, and it’s almost natural to be like this, naked in the dirt, and when he takes his clothes off too, she presses the length of her body against his, and the warmth of him bleeds through her skin, right into her bones.

She’s never fucked a werewolf before, she realises; she hadn’t thought them to be this warm.

His hands skim all over her body, over the planes of her back, the dip of her spine, until they rest on her hips, before reaching down, almost hesitantly, to grope at her ass. She moans into his mouth, threads her fingers through his golden hair, shining in the streak of light that shows through the tree line.

She reaches between his legs, finds his cock and wraps her slim fingers around the base.

She’s not one to play around.

She has an itch, and the itch must be scratched.

He yelps at the grip of her palm around him, and a smile plays on the edges of her mouth, even as she kisses him, thinking that maybe he’s as inexperienced as a man as he is as a wolf.

She sits astride him, rising off his mouth, and finds one of his free hands, dragging it up so that she can lay it over her breast, over her heart, and he stares up at her awe. He squeezes slightly, feeling the weight in his palm, and his thumb drags over her nipple until it tightens.

Toni chews on her lower lip, as the pinprick of pleasure stretches down into her pelvis, making her flutter around nothing.

He explores her for a bit, a woman’s body that he’s likely only seen in pictures or grainy videos on the Internet, trailing his thin, long-fingered hands over her body, the swell of her breasts and her flat belly, the backs of her thighs, before his thumbs slot in the dip of her pelvic bone, barely grazing over the thatch of dark hair between her legs.

She straddles his hips, the head of Steve’s cock fitting against her cunt, and she sinks down the rest of the way. She removes her hand just before he fills her completely, up to the base of his cock, and presses the heels of her palms against his shoulder for purchase.

She rises and falls, taking control of the rhythm, as he holds onto her hips for dear life, feeling her throb and clench around him, the hot, sweet flex of her cunt around him, gripping him like a vice, as she moves atop him with sinuous grace.

She’s so wet that she’s dripping down his cock, and he thrusts inside her, his hips arching off the ground, furious and clumsy and somehow familiar – she’s missed it, missed the weight and feel of a man inside her, what it feels like to have the pleasure ripped from her body with a single thrust.

He’s filling her deeper and rougher, and her nails are digging into his bony shoulders, and the throbbing changes, stretches through her entire body and becomes sharp and edges right between her legs. She slides her hand between their bodies to where they’re joined, and his eyes widen comically as he realises what she’s about to do.

She rubs her thumb against her clit, soft and maddeningly slow, in an attempt to draw out the sensation, to hit the peak of orgasms, and she slides a finger inside her, beside his cock, stretching her to skirt the edge of pain, and he groans at how impossibly tight she is around her cock.

She arches her back, thrusting her breasts into his face, and he surges up with newfound strength, his hands tightening around the curve of her hips to the point of bruising, so that he can drag in a nipple between his teeth, making her cry out and dig her nails in.

His hand joins hers at her cunt, circling her clit with his thumb as well, wringing a sharp, high-pitched noise from Toni at the back of her throat, and she comes, her cunt squeezing him so tight that Steve stops breathing underneath her.

Her orgasm washes over in such a sudden, furious rush that she joins him in his breathlessness, suspended in mid-air by a sensation so thorough and so demanding that she doesn’t know up from down, left from night, in that single instant, her world reducing to a single point, this point, something clear and bright and sharp, and her cunt throbs in time with it.

Steve chases his climax with shallow, aimless thrusts that Toni doesn’t quite pay attention to, arching his back as he comes, comes with her name behind his teeth, a long, deep call that echoes through the woods, makes the trees themselves shake, filling her up with his come.

She lifts off his cock, when her toes stop curling, settling onto the dirt beside him, panting hard, running the heels of her hands over the pleasant stretch in her legs, her thighs awash with his spend.

“Well, how was that?” she asks, her hair a riotous tumble of curls around her face.

Steve is still breathless, and he looks like he’s about to have a panic attack, as he looks her over, as if he believes her to be a dream, something unreal and not for him to touch, her soft breasts and lithe body, the lascivious sort of look in her eyes, her eyes black beneath her lashes, her skin covered in slick, come and sweat, the dusky stretch of her abdomen, her cunt as dark pink as her mouth.

“I’ve never had sex with a girl before,” he says, almost shyly.

Toni smiles, slow like the drip of honey from a spoon. “I had guessed that,” she tells him.

The colour is high in his cheeks, as he rubs the back of his neck. “That obvious, huh?”

Toni throws her head back and laughs. “There’s no shame in inexperience. It just means… you’re a blank slate. You don’t have bad habits, which poses well for the lovers that you’ll have. You have an eternity to learn.” She pauses. “Unless, of course, our foray into hot, passionate sex in the middle of the forest has changed your mind.”

Her voice is dry.

Steve’s face is still red, but he shakes his head.

“No, no,” his face turns stern, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

She reaches out, smooths a thumb over his well-defined cheekbone. “And you’re doing it for the right reasons,” she says.

Steve purses his lips into a thin, determined line. He looks away. “For as long as I can remember, I just wanted to do what was right. And it landed me in some fuckin’ alley, while my best friend bled out into the cement and I couldn’t fuckin’ do anything.” He clenches his fists hard atop his thighs, his eyes briefly shutting closed. “Besides,” his mouth twists up at the corners, not a smile but close. “I don’t like bullies, and your stepfather sounds like one.”

“He is,” Toni says, an old rage curdling in her breast, as comforting as a mother’s embrace (she doesn’t remember those, not really; she only remembers the disgust as the wolf within her is torn from her grasp). “He is a bully.”

“Then, I want this,” Steve says, firmly.

Toni bites back the flood of words that rise up in her throat in response, the satisfaction, the absolute joy that rushes through her belly like she’s burning from the inside of her throat.

The village girl is dead, and she is made of iron.

She cannot be touched. 

Without saying anything, she clambers on top of him, knees on either side of his hips, and she grips him by the neck, leaning in, so that he can kiss her again. She twists her wrists sharply, and his neck snaps between her hands like it’s a toothpick, and Steve Rogers dies.

An hour later, his eyes snap open, and his eyes are as gold as hers; he opens his mouth, revealing the shine of his teeth, the razor-sharp line of his fangs, the fangs that would fell a vampire with a single bite, and he lifts his head, staring at her.

His eyes are oases of compassion, even with the hybrid fervour that she can see humming through his slight body.

 _I could tear out your throat, and you would only thank me_ , she realises, her eyes trailing greedy-hot over the sight of him. _I could walk all over you, and you wouldn’t dare make a sound._

She crawls on top of him, pins him to the ground, ready to slide onto his cock as she did before, but he touches her face, his fingers sliding into her hair, and her lust pauses, her whole face trembles beneath his touch, because no one has touched her like this, no one has wanted her the way that she can see him want her.

Anxiety clamps around her body like a vice, and then, she steels her nerve.

Gods help her, he is no pawn, and maybe, after Obadiah is dead, after her war is over and all there is left for her is crude, perfect satisfaction with the bastard’s head on a spike, she won’t see this one dead as she should.

Maybe, she’ll keep him.

“You are mine,” she growls, and his mouth is hot under his, tasting faintly of iron.

And it begins like this, unholy and raw and blood slick, sealed with her kiss.


End file.
